Dr. Fox effect

The Dr. Fox effect is a correlation observed between teacher expressiveness, content coverage, student evaluation and student achievement. This effect also allows insight to other related effects, such as those discussed below, and relationships between student achievement and evaluations of the teacher. The original experiment was performed at the University of Southern California School of Medicine in 1970 in which two speakers gave lectures to a classroom of MDs and PhDs (psychiatrists and psychologists) on a meaningless topic. The topic, "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education", was chosen to eliminate any chances the students being lectured would know something about the actual subject. Students were divided into two separate classrooms; one classroom would be lectured by an actual scientist and the other by an actor, Michael Fox, who was given the identity "Dr. Myron L. Fox", a graduate of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In the first half of the study the actor was instructed to teach his material in a more monotone and inexpressive voice. This lecture was then compared to the control lecture by the scientist. After the lectures, the students were tested on the information they had learned. The students who attended the lecture taught by the scientist learned more about the material and performed better on the examination. However, when both the actor and the scientist presented their material in an engaging, expressive, and enthusiastic manner, the students rated Dr. Fox just as positively as the genuine professor. This lack of correlation between content-coverage and ratings resulting from conditions of strong expressiveness became known as "the Dr. Fox effect". In a critique of student evaluations of teaching, professor of law Deborah Jones Merritt summarized the Dr. Fox effect as it was observed in the first experiments: "The experimenters created a meaningless lecture and coached the actor to deliver it 'with an excessive use of double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements.